For
the creation of paintings, works of graphic art, free-standing sculptures and
reliefs there is a fairly limited number of materials and techniques; these have
changed relatively little during the last 300 years.

Even though new materials and
methods have developed, the artistic techniques in the areas of painting,
graphic arts and sculpture have kept their traditional character. A painting on
canvas today has a technical structure largely similar to that of a seventeenth
century painting.

The
possibility of giving pictorial expression to the artist's message is however
not tied to traditional methods. For the majority of people in the industrial
countries, television, video newspapers and advertising have become the dominant
transmitters of pictures and visual images. Television and video in particular
have come to extend more and more widely through the global development of
distribution systems, and are frequently used as a medium for other art forms,
such as film, theatre and pictorial arts.

In this context it should be
emphasised that it is journalists, above all, who have been recruited to these
areas and who have therefore had an opportunity of exploiting the particular and
specialised resources which television and video have at their disposal. The
fact that pictorial artists occupy a subordinate position would seem partly to
be connected with the fact that art schools still limit their educational role
to the traditional creation of static images.

The
work of artistic/technical development presupposes that artists have access to
specialised technical studio equipment.

Television has been in existence now for almost 50 years. During this
period a significant number of cultural programmes have been made by artists.
Very rarely, however, have these artists produced works directly
intended/designed for this medium. Although television per se is a
pictorial medium, it has primarily been used to transmit words. The stress has been laid on 'tele' or the
transporting/transmitting aspects of the medium, and comparatively little
attention has been paid to the conceptual element of 'vision'; that is to say
those aspects having to do with the language of the images
themselves.

If
one looks back on the history of art and makes comparisons with the visual
aesthetics used in television today, one is struck be the fact that the greater
proportion of all television production today uses visual aesthetics dating back
to the 16th century. As an example we may mention the aesthetics of Cubism: this
implied a visualisation of several different points of view being given
simultaneous expression and coinciding with the discoveries by modern physics of
Time and Space being only relative and not absolutely fixed
structures.

Cubism dates back more than 50
years, and yet, in a television programme a few years ago it would be
unthinkable to use Cubist visual aesthetics.

This situation is however
changing rapidly at the present moment. During the last decades or so, a series
of international artists have initiated the construction of elctronic image
laboratories, where they pursue the development of new art forms through
experimental techniques.

Those international artists who
have access to modern electronic technology have been given the opportunity of
realising, by a creative process, their ideas concerning a truly
visually-oriented language. Artists with many different points of view and modes
of expression have begun working with computer/electronics/video, taking their
point of departure in their previous knowledge and training. Painters,
sculptors, musicians, photographers, composers, choreographers and others
have approached this medium with their own particular talents and creative
methodology and all have contributed to media development in the area of
television film and video and to a visual language characterised by greater
awareness and creativity.

International electronic music
studios have conducted its work of development in music for nearly 30 years,
those artists who have been engaged in similar work within the visual arts field
are mostly still obliged to manage completely without any corresponding access
to electronic equipment.

In
a number of countries considerable sums have been invested, for many years, in
facilities for practical experimentation in both the visual and audio
areas.

The
creation of electronic images (sometimes called 'video art'), is an artistic
development of visual language. Modern 'electronics' can convert sound
vibrations into visual structures, and image components into patterns of sound,
thereby giving visual expression to basic processes such as growth and change.
The essential definition of 'video art' is based on the manipulation of video
signals. Apart from the use of video to realise a series of images in a temporal
sequence, artists can also exploit television as a physical, sculptural, object.
At galleries they make 'installations' or 'environments' by placing one or more
monitors or giant screen projections in specific, related positions. Video
cameras, too, 'incorporate' the spectator into the work. In this way, it is
possible to explore perceptions of what is seen, as well as the psychology of
seeing, in a living context.

An
electronic image laboratory, however, should not be limited to video. Another
related area is the so-called computer animation (computer-assisted and/or
computer-generated images). This technique is based on advanced forms of
programming and opens up hiterto unimagined possibilities of free-image
composition.

With the aid of electronics and
laser the static image, too, will have an interesting development in the fields
of painting and graphic arts. Attempts in this direction have been demonstrated
in the form of 'video paintings', or more precisely, electronic painting and
computer art.

-Ture Sjölander
1973

Catalogue text from the
World Conference on Culture
Stockholm Sweden
1998

and have since then continuously been
artistically working on the very same visual
origin/material, and still expanding my
creation up-to-date.

Actually, it is a timeless art work in
its origin and do not deserve to be described as "history", 40 years
later.

A small number of people -
"technician's", "artist's", "producer's, and so on... who have assisted me
through the years have sometimes made unsubstantial claims to be the
"director's", "producer's", "technician's", "artist's" or the original
creator's of my works or even said that I was only an insignificant
member of a group. After all the acknowledgments and grants I have received,
nationally and internationally, and after all the world wide attention in media,
I got the last 40 years it is easy to understand certain peoples jealous
attitude and some of them are still persistent in making wrongful remarks and
malicious slanders about me and my artistic creations.

During the period between 1965 and 1975,
which could be considered as the defining period of video art, there was
significant research activity amongst artists working with video to develop,
modify or invent video imaging instruments or
synthesizers.

The first generation of video
artist/engineers include Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Lars Weck, Eric Seigel,
Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, and Bill and Louise Etra, in addition to
the well-documented collaborative work of Nam June Paik and Shuya
Abe.

The work of these pioneers is important
because, in addition to exploring the potential of video as a means of creative
expression, they developed a range of relatively accessible and inexpensive
image manipulation devices specifically for 'alternative' video
practice.

TURE SJOLANDER AND
MONUMENT

In September 1966 Swedish
artists Ture Sjolander ( 1937-, Sweden) and Bror Wikstrom broadcast Time, a
30-minute transmission of electronically manipulated paintings on National
Swedish Television. Sjolander and Wikstrom had worked with TV broadcast engineer
Bengt Modin to construct a temporary video image synthesizer which was used to
distort and transform video line-scan rasters by applying tones from waveform
generators. The basic process involved applying electronic distortions during
the process of transfer of photographic transparencies and film clips. According
to Modin they introduced the electronic transformations using two approaches.
The geometric distortion of the scanning raster of the video signal by
feeding various waveforms to the scanning coil, and video distortion by the
application of various electronic filters to the luminance
signal.

Sjolander had begun working with broadcast
television with the production of his first multimedia experiment The Role of
Photography, commissioned by the National Swedish Television in 1964, which was
broadcast the following year. With the broadcasting of Time, his second project
for Swedish television, Sjolander was well aware of the significance of his work
and importance of the artistic statement he was making:

Time is the very first video art work
televised at that point in time for the reason to produce an historical record
as well as an evidence of original visual free art, made with the electronic
medium - manipulation of the electronic signal - and exhibited/installed through
the television, televised.

In 1967, Sjolander teamed up with Lars Weck
and, using a similar technological process, produced Monument, a programme of
electronically manipulated monochrome images of famous people and cultural icons
including the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, the Beatles, Adolf Hitler and Pablo
Picasso. (Separate text of this work as below)

This programme was broadcast to a potential
audience of over 150 million people in France, Italy Sweden, Germany and
Switzerland in 1968, as well later in the USA. Subsequently, Sjolander produced
a Space in the Brain (1969) based on images provided by NASA, extending his
pioneering electronic imaging television work to include the manipulation and
distortion of colour video imagery. A Space in the Brain was an attempt to deal
with notions of space, both the inner worldof the brain and the new televisual
space created by electronic imaging.

Sjolander, originally a painter and
photographer, had become increasingly dissatisfied with conventional
representation as a language of communication and began experimenting with
the manipulation of photographic images using graphic and chemical means. For
Sjolander, broadcast television represented truly contemporary
communication medium that should be adopted as soon as possible by artists - a
fluid transformation and constant stream of ideas within the reach of millions.

The televised electronic images Sjolander and his
collaborators produced with Time, Monument and Space in the Brain were further
extended via other means. The television system was exploited as a generator of
imagery for further distribution processes including silkscreen printing,
posters, record covers, books and paintings that were widely distributed and
reproduced, although ironically signed and numbered as if in limited
editions.

It seems likely that these pioneering broadcast
experiments were influential on the subsequent work of Nam June Paik
and others. According to Ture Sjolander, Paik visited Stockholm in the summer of
1966 and was shown still images from Time while on a visit to the Elektron Musik
Studion (EMS). Additionally, Sjolander is in possession of a copy of a letter
dated 12 March 1974 from Sherman Price of Rutt Electrophysics in New York,
acknowledging the significance of Monument to the history of 'video animation',
and requesting detailed information about the circuitry employed to obtain the
manipulated imagery. In reply, Bengt Modin, the engineer who had worked with
Sjolander, provided Price with a circuit diagram and an explanation of their
technical approach to the project, claiming he 'no longer knew the whereabouts
of the artists involved'.

THE PAIK-ABE
SYNTHESIZER

The Paik-Abe Synthesizer, built in 1969 is one of the
earliest examples of a self-contained video image-processing device. As we have
seen, Ture Sjolander and his collaborators had brought together video processing
technology in temporary configuration to produce their early broadcast
experiments, Paik's synthesizer was a self-contained unit built expressly and
exclusively for the purpose. The instrument, or video synthesizer, as it came to
be known, enabled the artist to add colour to a monochrome video image, and to
distort the conventional TV camera image. -.......

Extending a dialogue that they had begun in Tokyo in
1964, electronic engineer Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik began building a video
synthesizer in 1969 at WGBH-TV in Boston, possibly spurred on by the work of
Sjolander in Sweden.

from Chris Meigh-Andrews book, A HISTORY
OF VIDEO ART, Publisher BERG, Oxford-New York. First Edition October
2006

Monument, characterized by Ture Sjolander
as a series of 'electronic paintings' is a free flowing colage of
electronically distorted and transformed icoic media images. Set to a similarly
improvised jazz and sound effects track, images of pop stars, political and
historical celebrities and media personalities, culled from archive film footage
and photographic stills have been electronically manipulated - stretched,
skewed, exploded, rippled and rotated. The relentless flow of semi-abstracted
monochromatic faces and associated sounds seems to both celebrate and satirize
the contemporary visual culture of the time. In its fluid mix of visual
information it generalizes the television medium, draining it of its specific
content and momentary significance. It creates a kind of
'monument' to the ephemeral - all this will pass, as it is passing before you
now.

Archive film footage and photographic
stills of familiar faces and people, such as Lennon and McCartney, Chaplin,
Hitler, the Mona Lisa - the 'monument' of the world culture - flicker and flash,
stretch and ooze across the television screen. In some moments the television
medium is itself directly referenced, the familiar screen shape presented and
rescanned, images of video feedback and, at one point, its vertical roll out of
adjustment, anticipate Joan Jonas's seminal tape, although for very different
purposes. The work anticipated a number of later videotapes, particularly the
distorted iconic images of Nam June Paik.

Gene Youngblood described the psychological
power and effect of these transformations i his influential and visionary book
Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970):

Images undergo transformations at first
subtle, like respiration, then increasingly violent until little remains of the
original icon. In this process, the images pass through thousands of stages of
semi-cohesion, making the viewer constantly aware of his orientation to the
picture. The transformations accur slowly and with great speed, erasing
perspectives, crossing psycological barriers. A figure might stretch like a
silly putty or become rippled in liquid universe. Harsh basrelief effects
accentuate physical dimensions with great subtlety, so that one eye or ear might
appear slightly unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a
constellation of shimmering video phosphores.

Sjolander and his collaborators at Sveriges
Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Company) in Stockholm had worked together on a
number of related projects since the mid-1960s, beginning with The Role of Photography, Sjolander's first experiment with
electronic manipulations of the broadcast image in 1965. This project was
followed with the broadcast of Time (1966), a thirty-minute transmission of
'electronic paintings' produced using the same temporarily configured video
image synthesizer that was later used to create Monument.

The system that Sjolander and his
colleagues used involved the transfer of photographic images (film footage and
transparencies) to videotape using a 'flying-spot' telecine machine. This
process produced electronic images which they transformed and manipulated by
applying square and sine signals with a waveform generator during the transfer
stage, often using this process repeatedly to apply greater levels of
transformation.

For Sjolander and his collaborator Lars
Weck, the broadcasting of Monument was the epicentre of an extended
communication experiment in electronic image-making reaching out to an audience
of millions.

Kristian Romare, writing in a book
published as part of an extended series of artworks which included publishing,
posters, record covers and paintings after the broadcasting of Monument,
describes the scope of Sjolander and Weck,s vision and aspirations for the new
image-generating technique they had pioneered:

In this process images are produced using a
television camera rescanning an oscilloscope or CRT screen. The display images
are manipulated (squeezed, stretched, rotated, etc.) using magnetic or
electronic modulation. The manipulated images, rescanned by a second camera are
then fed through an image processor. This type of instrument was also used
without an input camera feed, the resultant images produced by manipulation
of the raster. Examples of this type of instrument include Ture
Sjolander,s ' Temporary " Video Synthesizer (1966-69), the Paik/Abe Synthesizer,
and the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor (1973).

" Public television stations in the
United States and Europe fostered experimentation by allowing accessto fully
equipped studios. Starting in the late 1960's
Boston's public television station, WGBH, with funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation, produced the New Television Workshop under the leadership of Fred
Barzyk.

In 1969 six
artists (Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, James
Seawright, ThomasTadlock, and Aldo Tambellini
) made videotapes using WGBH equipment for a program called "The Medium is the
Medium" which aired nationally. This was the widest exposure the new practice of
video art had yet received."

"Swedish artists Ture Sjolander, Lars Weck, and Bengt Modin
produced M o n u m e n t ( 1967 ), a program for experimental television
which combined pre-recorded film, slides, and videotapes in a process that
distorted images during the transmission of the image from the tape to the
television. After seeing these for the first time, historian Gene Youngblood said, 'We see the Beatles, Charlie Chaplin,
Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the King of Sweden, and other famous figuers distorted
witha kind of insane electronic
disease."

"Many innovations in what later became
computer animation were inaugurated by video artists who early on developed
electronic imaging techniques."

Michael Rush,
1999.

WORD
PICTURES

Those who claim that we live
today in a visually oriented culture are probably word-blind. Today's visual art
and visual media, with the possible exception of painting, still bear a
master-slave relationship to elite literature and popular journalism - in the
beginning was the Word. The word is power. People who can express themselves
well and forcefully in speech and writing, more or less automatically achieve
positions of power... while people who express themselves well in pictures, must
often support themselves through stipends and other grants.

The producers of words dominate
the cultural columns of newspapers, control official cultural policy and the
most important visual media. And generally exert a damnably important influence
on society. The arts in Sweden are infested by the speech chorus and the clatter
of typewriters. Authors write screenplays and become film directors. Journalists
become television producers (or programme directors) and make TV-films. Our
entire culture is beset by word-producers. Authors, journalists, investigators,
letter-writers, polemicists and critics. Who, in fact, knows anything about
pictures? And why do we understand so little about visual semantics? Photography
and motion pictures have existed for 100 years, television for 50. Despite this,
pictures have not attained more than a purely illustrative function. Why?
Probably, because most of our pictures are created by Word-people. In fact,
roughly half the items on TV today could just as well be broadcast on radio
instead.

Ture Sjölander
1973

In the short history of video
animation the Swedish artists TURE SJOLANDER and BROR WIKSTROM are the
pioneers.

Their television art programme ' TIME
' (1965 - 1966) seems to be the first distortion of video-scan-line rasters
achieved by applying tones from wave form generators.

For almost ten years they have been
using electronic image-making equipment for a non-traditional statement. It must
be kept in mind, however that SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM have a traditional and
solid artistic background. Howard Klein likens the relationship between
the video artist and his hardware to that between Ingres and the graphite
pencil. It should be added that real artists like SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM
have a natural relationship to any image-making equipment. In that respect they
differ from most cameramen and tape makers and they may come back some day as
pioneers in other fields of art.

In fact they have already surpassed
the limits of video and TV using the electronic hardware to produce pictures
which can be applied as prints, wall paintings and
tapestries.

They have generously provided new
possibilities to other artists, they are not working alone on a monument of
their own.

It is significant that the Royal
Swedish Academy of Fine Arts has decided to support SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM
financially.

We live at a time when borders between
the art forms are constantly being redrawn or abolished. Poets arrange their
poems as pictorial compositions or record spoken sequences of sound which can
hardly be distinguished from musique concrète. Composers are able to
build a complete composition around the manipulation of a spoken voice. Artists
sometimes create pictures by striking off newspaper photographs or mixing
conglomerates of discarded objects and painted areas into something which is
neither picture nor sculpture. Puppet theatre is performed by setting mobiles in
motion in the constantly changing light effects on a stage.

The border between photography and
painting is no longer clear, either, and it is easy to understand why this is
so. Tinguély, the creator of mobiles, started out by making a form of reliefs
with moving parts, powered by a machine placed at the back of them. After a
while Tinguély began to wonder why he could not equally well show the play of
cog wheels and driving belts at the rear and let "machine" and "shapes" become a
united whole.

Similarly, some photographers have
asked themselves why the action of light on photo paper and the development
baths could not become a creative process comparable with the exposure of a
motif  why camera work and darkroom work could not become
one.

Among those photographers we find
Ture Sjölander. Among those photo graphic artists, as he calls them, who
feel dissatisfied with the dialectic of the traditional photographers
relationship to his motif: when he searches for his motif, he is the sovereign
master of it, choosing and rejecting it . At the very moment that he touches
the trigger, he has become enslaved to the motif, without any possibility (other
than in terms of light gradation) to do what a painter does  reshape, exclude,
and emphasize in the motif.

This subjection to the motif does not
have to be disrupted by eliminating the motif. The photographer simply needs to
remove the limits to what is permitted and what is not allowed. To let the copy
of a photo remain in the water bath for an hour is allowed (if you want to keep
the motif). But leaving it there for a couple of days is the right thing as well
(if you want to let the motif diffuse into deformations soft and silky as fur).
Scratching with a needle or a razor blade is making accidents with scratches
into a virtue  and so on.

In addition, there is the chance of
manipulating a figurative or non-figurative motif by copying different pictorial
elements into it, by enlargements which elevate previously imperceptible
structures to the visible level, even up to monumental dimensions. The tension
between scratching lines of light into a developed (black) negative the size of
a matchbox and enlarging it on the Agfa papers the size of a bed sheet. This is
where the photographer has at his command tricks of his art which the painter
lacks, or at any rate seldom uses.

But on the other hand, is the
photographer able freely to experiment with the colour? Yes, he is  if he
brushes paint on to the negative and makes a colour copy.

He may also, like Ture
Sjölander, brush, pour, draw etc. on a photo paper  possibly with a
background copied on to it  with water, developing or fixing sodium
thiosulphite solutions, ferrocyanide of potassium and other liquids. In that
case the result is a single, once-only, art work. In this way he is able to
achieve a tempered and melting colour scale of white, sepia, ochre, thunder
cloud grey, verdigris, silver and possibly also certain blue and red
tones.

In this area, however, it seems
everything still remains to be done  but one single photographers resources
are not enough for the experiments to be conducted widely and in depth. Sweden
has recently inaugurated its first studio of electronic music. When will
photographers and painters be given the opportunity to explore this
no-mans-land between their time-honoured frontlines?

But can photography, in principle, be
equal to painting? Is not the glossy, non-handmade character of the photo an
obstacle? People have argued in a similar way about enamel work, but that
technique is now recognised as totally and completely of a kind with the painted
picture. If we adjust the focus of the "conventional painting concept" when we
are looking at photo painting, we will perchance discover that in its singular
immaterial quality it can possess new and suggestive value.

Öyvind
Fahlström

Stockholm,
1961.

Translation from Swedish by Birgitta
Sharpe

TIME

"VIDEOART" ELECTRONIC PAINTINGS -
TELEVISED 1966 - 1967 - 1969.

"The role of Photography" Commissioned
by the National Swedish Television year 1964. B/w. Multimedia/electronic
experiment. 30 minutes. And an outdoor exhibition on giant bill board in the
City of Stockhom plus indoors exhibitions at Lunds Konsthall and Gavle Museeum
among other Gallerys. Represented at Moderna Museet Stockholm.

"TIME"

- b/w, Commissioned by the National Swedish Television.
Electronic paintings televised in September 1966. 30 minutes. A
video synthesizer was temporarily
built, in spite of the
TV-technicians apprehension. (Same technical system was later used to create
MONUMENT one year later, 1967.) See lettersfrom RUTT
ELECTROPHYSICS, NY, USA dated March 12, 1974, below *. "In principle this
process is similar to methods used by Nam June Paik and others, some years
later." Rutt&Etra . Nam June Paik visited Elektronmusic Studion in
Stockholm July/August 1966 , during the Stockhom Festival; "Visions of
the Present". Static pictures from TIME was demonstrated for Paik at this
point in time. A rich documentation is available from the main news media in
Sweden about "TIME". Parts of "TIME" was planned to be send via satellite to
New York, but the American participants, E.A.T. - Billy Kluver and &,
pulled out. (See E.A.T.s and Billy Kluver's biased USA history page from Aug.
1966) "TIME" is the very first 'videoart'-work televised as an ultimate
exhibition/installation statement, televised at that point in 'time' for the
reason to produce an historical record as well as an evidence of 'original'
visual free art, made with the electronic medium - manipulation of the
electronic signal - and 'exhibited/installed' through the televison,
televised. Other important factors for the creation of TIME was our awareness
of the fact that the "electron" was, at this Time, the smallest known particle
and that all traditional visual art, up to this Time was created with light -
material/colour reflecting the light - (lightpainting) and the description of
our new concept should be "Electronic painting". Pontus Hulten and his
associates launched the term "Machine" art as an attempt to describe the Time
movement. Pierre Restany was using the term "Mec Art", later. The work was
commenced early 1966. (Soundtrack by Don Cherry, USA) Paintings on canvass and
paper was made from the static material, and in silk-screen prints, for a
large numbers of Fine Arts Galleries and Museums 1966, ironically in a
'limited edition', signed and numbered by the artist; Ture Sjolander/Bror
Wikstrom. (See National Museeum Stockholm, Sweden).

"MONUMENT"

- b/w. Electronic paintings televised in 5
European Nations; France, Italy, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, 1968.
Monument reached an total audience of more than 150 miljon. The work surpassed
the limits of "videoart" - a word first used in the beginning of 1970 - 73 -
and was developed into an extended communication project, involving other
visual artists, by invitations, multimedia artwork including the creation of
tapestries, (Kerstin Olsson) silk/screen prints on canvass and paper - first
edition, by Ture Sjolander/Lars Weck, posters, and an LP/Record Music,
(Hansson&Karlsson) and some years later paintings on canvass, (Sven-Inge),
and a book among other things, exhibited in several international Fine Arts
Galleries. Catalogue text for Ture Sjolander by Pierre
Restany, Paris Oct.31, 1968.

Gene Youngbloods book "Expanded Cinema". 1970.

"SPACE IN THE BRAIN" - 30 minutes. Televised 1969, in direct connection with
the moonlanding project by NASA. in Swedish Television. Soundtrack by
Hansson&Karlsson. First colour electronic original painting where the
electronic signal where manipulated. Described in media as an Electronic Space
Opera. Based on authentic material directly delivered from NASA. Space in the
Brain was a creation dealing with the ; "space out there" - the space in our
brains and the electronic space, (in television) Contemporary to Clarke's
2001, except that the Picture it self was scrutinized and the subject, and
focused, in Space in the Brain. The Static material from the electronic
paintings was worked out into other medias and materials; tapestrys made in
France among other objects was made in large size, 3 x 2 meter, for Albany
Corporation USA and for IBM, Sweden, as in "TIME" and "MONUMENT", see above.

And a serie of bestseller posters was
produced, and world wide distributed, by Scan-Décor Upsala, Sweden.

To: International Section of Swedish
National Television, Stockholm, Sweden.

Extracts;

"I am writing a detailed magazine article about
the history of video animation.

From literature avaiable I gather that a
videofilm program, "MONUMENT", broadcast in Stockholm in January, 1968,
was the first distortion of video scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones
from wave form generators.

This is of such great importance - historically -
that I would like to obtain more detailed documentation of the program and of
the electronic circuitry employed to manipulate the video
images.

I understand from your New York office that there
may have been a brochure or booklet published about the program.

I will be happy to pay any expense for
publications, photcopies or other documents about the program and its production
-particulary with regard to the method of modulating the deflection voltage
in the flying-spot telecine used.

"Video synthesis" is becoming a prominent
technique in TV production here in the United States, and I think it will be
interesting to give credit to your broadcasting system and personal for
achieving this historic innovation."

( A number of authentic documents/letters from
this communications is avaliable)

No "detailed article" or even magazine was never
reported or later presented after receiving the vital

information from the Swedish Broadcating Company, by Rutt
Electrophysics)

Letter from the Manager of

THE PINK FLOYD.

Stockholm, Septembre 11th
1967.

Dear Messrs Sjolander &
Weck,

Having seen your interesting Stockholm
exhibition of portraits of the King of Sweden made with advanced electronic
techniques I have been struck by the connection between this new type of image
creating and the music-and-light art presented by The Pink
Floyd.

I think that your work could and
should be linked with the music of The Pink Floyd in a television production,
and I would like to suggest that we start arranging the practical details for
such a production immedialtely. With all his experiences from filming in the USA
and elsewhere I also feel that Mr. Lars Swanberg is the ideal man tp help us
made the film.

Please get in touch as soon as
possible.

Yours sincerely

Andrew King

Monument

KRISTIAN ROMARE

Art Writer

The following text was written by the
Swedish Art Writer KRISTIAN ROMARE 1968.

MONUMENT

electronic painting
1968

by

TURE SJOLANDER/LARS
WECK

We create
pictures. We form conceptions of all the objects of our experience. When talking
to each other our conversation emerges in the form of descriptions. In that way
we understand one another.

Instantaneous communication in all
directions. Our world in television! The world in image and the image in the
world: at the same moment, in the consciousness and in the eyes of
millions.

The true multi-images is not substance
but process-interplay between people.

"Photography freed us from old
concepts", said the artist Matisse. For the first time it showed us the
object freed from emotion.

Likewise satellites showed us for the
first time the image of the earth from the outside. Art abandoned representation
for the transformational and constructional process of depiction, and Marcel
Duchamp shifted our attention to the image-observer
relation.

That, too, was perhaps like viewing a
planet from the outside. Meta-art: observing art from the outside. That
awareness has been driben further. The function of an artist is more and more
becoming like that of a creative revisor, investigator and transformer of
communication and our awareness of them.

Multi-art was an attempt to widen the
circulation of artist's individual pictures. But a radical multi-art should not,
of course, stop the mass production of works of art: it should proceed towards
an artistic development of the mass-image.

MONUMENT is such a step. What has
compelled TURE SJOLANDER and LARS WECK is not so much a technical
curiosity as a need to develop a widened, pictorially communicative
awareness.

They can advance the effort further in
other directions. But here they have manipulated the electronic transformations
of the telecine and the identifications triggered in us by well-known faces, our
monuments. They are focal points. Every translation influences our perception.
In our vision the optical image is rectified by inversion. The electronic
translation represented by the television image contains numerous deformations,
which the technicians with their instruments and the viewers by adjusting their
sets usually collaborate in rendering unnoticeable.

MONUMENT makes these visible, uses
them as instruments, renders the television image itself visible in a new way.
And suddenly there is an image-generator, which - fully exploited - would be
able to fill galleries and supply entire pattern factories with fantastic visual
abstractions and ornaments.

Utterly beyond human
imagination.

SJOLANDER and WECK have made
silkscreen pictures from film frames. These stills are visual. But with
television, screen images move and effect us as mimics, gestures, convultions.
With remarkable pleasure we sense pulse and breathing in the electronic
movement. The images become irradiated reliefs and contours, ever changing as
they are traced by the electronic finger of the telecine.

With their production, MONUMENT,
SJOLANDER and WECK have demonstrated what has also been main-tained by
Marshall McLuhan: that the medium of television is tactile and
sculptural.

The Foundation for MONUMENT was the
fact that television, as no other medium, draws the viewers into an intimate
co-creativity. A maximum of identification - the Swedish King, The
Beatles, Chaplin, Picasso, Hitler etc, - and
a maximum of deformation.

A language that engages our total
instinct for abstraction and recognition.

On an island aptly
named Magnetic
Island off the coast of Australia, a Swedish artist lives
in exile. Just like so many others in today's media-landscape, he was first
praised and then brought to dust. However, he has left a lasting imprint on the
world. As early as the 1960's, he made the first electronic animation. Had he
been an inventor, he would have been celebrated as a genius today, but because
he is a predecessor in the world of art, things are different. In that world,
the great ones often have to die before they are recognized.

We all know how
Disney's famous cartoons were made: thousands of drawings, filmed in sequence.
Even today some films are made this way. However, electronic animation has
opened up a new world within the film industry and it has also made computer
games and countless graphic solutions possible in business and science.

Pixar, which used to
be part of Lucasfilm and then sold to Steve Jobs in the lat 1980's, made the
first completely computer animated film called "Andre and Wally B" in 1983. The
first feature length fully animated movie was Toy Story from 1995. It was made
by Pixar and distributed by Disney. Disney had already started to use computer
animation in Little Mermaid from 1989, and then on through Aladdin, Lion
King, Pocahontas, etc In those fantastic movies the pictures were however first
drawn on paper and then scanned into computers for painting and cleanup and
superimposition over painted backgrounds.

Decades earlier, in
1965, Ture Sjolander’s electronically manipulated
images were broadcasted by the Swedish Television (SVT). Among other things, Ture Sjolander was experimenting with
the question of how much the portrait of a person could be changed before it was
unrecognizable, something which has pioneered the amazing morph-technique that
is used today.

Gene Youngblood,
who, alongside with Marshall McLuchan, is the most celebrated media-philosopher
of today, devoted a whole chapter in his book Expanded Cinema, 1970, (Pre face by Buckminster-Fuller) to the
experiments of the SVT. Expanded cinema means transgression of conventions as well
as mind-expanding transgressions and new definitions. Sjolander’s broadcasts
were not technically sophisticated, but they were ground-breaking.

The film mentioned
by Youngblood is "Monument" (1968) by Ture Sjolander and Lars Weck. The other earlier televised pioneering
animation were "TIME" (1965/66) by Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom, and later
"Space in the Brain" (1969) by Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Sven Hoglund and
Lasse Svanberg. Whereas most of the modern-day artists fade into oblivion, Ture
Sjolander has found his place in the art history by the making of those films.

Ture, a lad from the
northern city of Sundsvall, had instant success with his opening exhibition at
the Sundsvalls Museum 1961. He moved to Stockholm in the beginning of the
1960's. At an exhibition in 1964 at Karlsson Gallery his imagery upset the public so much
that the gallery immediately became the trendiest place for young artists in
Stockholm.

In 1968, he created
another scandal, when the film "Monument" was televised in most European
countries. For a couple of years, Ture Sjolander was celebrated in France,
Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain and the USA. In Sweden there was a lot of
jealousy. The Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Sweden, to name a few,
bought his works, but the techniques he worked with were expensive and after a
few years, he found himself without resources. Instead he started to work with
celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. They taught him that exile – mental and physical - is the
only way to escape destruction for a creative genius. He moved to Australia.

Ture Sjolander's
works include photos, films, books, articles, textiles, tv-programs,
video-installations, happenings, sculptures and paintings – all scattered around
the Globe. Tracing will be a challenging and exciting task for a future
detective/biographer and web-archaeologist's.

But mostly, his work
consists of a life of questioning and creation. This is what sets him aside as
one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Another forerunner
in the art world, the internationally celebrated Swedish composer Ralph
Lundsten, says in an interview in the magazine SEX, 5, 2004: "In those days (the
19th century), a painting could create a revolution. Today people
look idly at all the thousands of exhibitions that there are.’ Hmm. Oh, really.
How clever he is’, and they yawn… If I were a visual artist, and if my ambition
was to create something new, I would devote myself to the possibilities of the
computer."

In
1974, Sherman Price of Rutt
Electrophysics, wrote to the Swedish Television Company (SVT): "Video
Synthesis is becoming a prominent technique in TV production here in the United
States, and I think it will be interesting to give credit to your broadcasting
system and personnel for achieving this historic invention."

He was referring to
Ture Sjolander's revolutionary work in the 1960's. No one at the SVT could at
that time imagine the importance that this innovation would have for television,
and hereby lost a lead position in the computer-development business.

Amongst the younger
generation of computer animators, few know that they have a Swedish predecessor.
Many engineers were probably working away in their cellars in those days, trying
to do the same thing, but Sjolander was the first person to show his results on
the air. If any of you would like to have a look at the Godfather of animation, you can find a glimpse of him by googling.

He did not seek to
patent his inventions and he has made no money from it. However, he has made it
to the history books as one of the great precursors of art - and perhaps also of
technology - of the 20th century.

For the past
decades, Ture Sjolander has mostly lived in Australia, but he has also worked in other countries, such as Papua
New Guinea and China.

After a couple of
decades of silence, Sjolander's groundbreaking work was shown at Fylkingen, the
avant guard media and music hide out in Stockholm in the spring of 2004.

In the autumn of
2004, some of his recent acrylic paintings on canvas were exhibited at the
Gallery Svenshog
outside of
Lund, Sweden. This was to commemorate the forty years that have gone by since
his last (scandalous) exhibition at Lunds Konsthall. Many artists take a
pleasure in provoking the established art world. Ture Sjolander also provokes the rest of the world.

The headlines on this spread
give a limited picture of Ture Sjolander's activities in the area of visual
arts. The number of pages of Aktuell Fotografi would not suffice to render all
the newspaper clippings in which he has featured!

In 1961, Ture Sjolander made
his debut as a visual artist with a visual exhibition in his native town
Sundsvall. He called the exhibition at Sundsvalls Museum 'photoGRAPHICS'. The
late artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote the text for the
catalogue of the exhibition. We quote: "one single photographer's resources are
not enough for the experiments to be conducted widely and in depth. Sweden has
recently inaugurated its first studio for electronic music. When will
photographers and painters be given the opportunity to explore this
no-man's-land between their time honoured frontlines?"

The photographic light
paintings of the exhibition were approximately a couple of square meters, black
and white graphic prints, produced with the help of light and various chemicals.
Some of the images were in colour, made by oxidising the silver of the photo
paper with the help of a burning hot flat-iron.

Kurt
Bergengren reviewed the exhibition in the afternoon paper Aftonbladet. He
wrote: "He does not call himself a photographer, but a photo-graphic artist, and
what is new about his pictures is first and foremost the technique he uses.
Sjolander indicates many new paths - by bringing back the art of photography to
its earliest photochemical experiments."

In the magazine Konstrevy, no 1 1963, Ture Sjolander's experiments are
presented in depth, and in connection with this, he exhibited his graphic art at
the Gallerie Observatorium in Stockholm, along with
artists Lars Hillersberg and Ulf
Rahmberg.

Åke
Daun wrote in Folket, on the 29th of March, 1963: "He calls
himself a photo-graphic artist, a union of photographer and graphic artist. He
has successfully managed - it sounds like a dream - to combine photographic
methods with free artistic creativity. From this technological platform,
Sjolander takes us along on trips to reality, but along other roads than the
ones we have tread before."

Ludvig
Rasmusson wrote in the student paper Gaudeamus: "By varying his formal
ways of expressing himself from one painting to the next, he does not show a
lack of personality. He simply does not trust that form of personality in art,
which consists in making one painting look like the next one, and he wishes to
force the viewer to look beyond form, towards content."

Alf
Nordström of the morning paper Dagens Nyheter wrote: "All those who like
pretty and well-behaved photo-art are seriously warned against having a closer
look at this exhibition. It offers howls and grimaces, cross-eyed faces and
horror studies of the female flesh. But all those who are interested in seeing a
photographer entering the current cultural debate, should not neglect seeing
'You have been photographed.' The exhibition has a very liberating feel to it.
Its nihilism leaves a burning imprint on your retina and the conventional images
are burned away. Your eyes begin to see anew."

In the news program
Aktuellt, Ulf Thoren showed parts of the exhibition,
and Sjolander coined the expression "We want to exhibit, not to inhibit." During
the two weeks that the exhibition was shown, some 10,000 people came to see it,
many of them attracted by the TV presentation.

In the afternoon paper
Expressen, Katja Walden wrote: " … the artist has
reached his goal, already when we react, when something happens between us and
the photograph. After Ulf Linde, in the year of pop
art and a couple of months after the New York-nights, everything is still
possible. Ture Sjolander has made something happen in the area of
photography."

Erland
Törngren wrote in the paper Arbetaren; "His images make most of what we
saw the other year, at the ambitious exhibition 'Swedish people as seen by 11
photographers,' look medieval. 'You have been photographed' is one the bravest
attempts of a coup, one of the boldest opening moves, that has ever hit Swedish
photography."

On April 24, 1965, in the paper
Kvällsposten, Sjolander asked: "Why do pictures have to be translated into
words?"

On July 6, 1965, Bengt Olvång wrote in the paper Stockholms Tidningen: "Ture
Sjolander's television appearance is characterised by a warm humaneness and a
bizarre, uproarious sense of humour. One of its most 'shocking' features is
composed of a grand piece of Vivaldi music, illustrated by a little boy who is
picking his nose. However, what is really most shocking, is the way in which the
Broadcasting Corporation is acting. Heads of department become self-appointed
censors, and in the name of 'The Swedish People', they erase program features,
such as Sjolander's TV film. The thought of letting opinions and values develop
freely is totally foreign to them. The broadcasting monopoly watches over
people's opinions and hinders all attempts at moving in any radical direction."

Jonas
Sima wrote in Stockholms Tidningen, on October 23, 1965: "Sjolander also
has opinions and a social temperament. He has produced the kind of film I want
to watch - and produce."

On October 28, 1965, Mauritz Edström wrote in Dagens Nyheter: "He is simply
testing our attitudes in relation to the photography, by placing it in
unexpected contexts. When he places his enlargements on billboards and then
films them, the result is really challenging: what resources of expression can't
we find lying idle under the old cobweb of conventional views on pictures!"

In the Dagens Nyheter's art column,
Olle Granath wrote on the 22nd of January,
1966: "The technique has the impersonality of the American pop-artists, but in
the motif, there is so much more interest in the contents of the picture. The
exciting pictures of this exhibition are those where you see these gigantic
photographs posted on some empty outdoor wall-space above people's heads -
people who are rushing past on the street like anonymous shadows, without
reacting to the new and provoking elements of their town. Being in such a hurry,
they may not have seen the provocation, but only the resemblance. There is
something eerily suggestive about these pictures, which remind you of the
documentary movie 'The Eye' that was shown on movie theatres some years
ago."

In 1968, when Annagreta Dyring of the magazine Populär Fotografi, resumed
what had happened in Swedish photography, she wrote this among other things:
"Ture Sjolander was the instigator of a recent event that caused great resonance
in the world of Swedish photography. It was at the time of poked tongues. The
grimace in the picture became the expression of a provocatively defensive
attitude towards a perhaps too expectant world around us. It meant to build a
bridge between the picture and the bloated spectator, even if it were to be
built out of ridicule. It gave another angle to the democracy of the photograph.
The traditional silence and the worn-out ways of presenting things had gotten
alternatives worthy of discussion. In other words, it was a bridge. It did not
matter (at least it does not matter looking at it in hindsight) if the bridge
was built out of deep respect, it was accepted even if it consisted of disgust
or horror. It was somewhat surrealistic, with a hint of dada. The main thing was
to give the viewers something to sink their teeth into. Sjolander's cheeky
revolt against standardised thinking and photographic conformism preceded - in
its pronounced form - other attempts at doing the same thing in this country. It
disturbed obsolete ways of thinking in the field of traditional visual
art."

Electronic
painting.

'TIME,' as well as 'Have you
thought about the role of photography…?' , were produced for television, which
its technology and basic functions in mind. Similar electronic works of art have
since rapidly been produced in different places of the world. Video art is now
an established notion. An American video artist, Nam June
Paik (born in Korea), has applied the same methods when producing his
works, after having Sjolander- Wikström show him 'TIME', both in person and
broadcast on Swedish television. Pontus Hultén, the
former director of the Museum of Modern Art in
Stockholm, recommended that Sjolander should apply for a government artist grant
of SEK 6,000, in 1966. Hultén wrote: "In recent years, Sjolander has, showing
great skills of inventiveness, worked on projects that bring together several
different, but costly proceedings of work. Since his ideas are among the most
interesting ones that have appeared in recent years, I would highly recommend
you to consider him for this grant." And Sjolander got the grant.

In December of 1966,
Sjolander went to London, Paris and Hamburg, and got an invitation to produce a
new piece of work from the French television (ORTF). Along with the foreign
correspondent of the leading morning paper Dagens Nyheter, Lars Weck (who was studying at the Sorbonne University in
Paris at the time), he outlined a new "program" called 'MONUMENT'. This
collaboration marked the beginning of a large-scale media art-project with an
audience of approximately 150 million people. Weck wrote in Dagens Nyheter on
the 4th of February, 1967 (before the beginning of their
co-operation): "Ture Sjolander has not used his first long sejour abroad to go
on pilgrimages to widely known monuments, unless you consider television one. He
finds it interesting to work directly for television, both because it makes
every person's home a gallery, and because it gives the artist so many technical
possibilities."

The Swedish Broadcasting
Corporation did not show any interest until both the French and the German
television companies had invited him to work with them. The Swedish
TV-production was brought about by Kristian Romare.
Several European countries broadcasted the completed production, which was also
transformed into different graphic productions on a large scale, there was the
LP-record 'Monument' with Hansson/Karlsson, the book
'Monument' with a preface written by Bengt Feldreich and TV technicians (among
others), there were outdoor- and gallery exhibitions. Others artists were
inspired by the visual material and coloured images from 'Monument' in
oil-colour and in various textile fabrics. Images from 'Monument' were shown at
the 5th Biennale in Paris, in the fall of 1967. Pierre Restany - one of Europe's most respected art critics
- wrote that unfortunately he was unable to attend the whole event because of a
journey to South America, but had to settle for the last few days: "But better
late then never. Sjolander's works struck me with their absolute modernism. I
was also struck by his acute instincts, his poetic use of the technology of the
mass-medium - an iconographic liberation on the level of information technology
- all in the language of the masses. Sjolander's works of art, which combine art
and technology, become an attempt to preserve our poetic survival. It is a truly
humane, or rather humanistic achievement, in the modern sense of the
word."

In March, 1967,
Sjolander-Weck formulated a kind of manifesto in the magazine Bazaar (no.1,
published by the Galleri Karlsson in Stockholm): "The
art gallery has to come to the people, obviously it is not working the other way
round. At least not if you are asking for art to be meaningful to more than a
handful of people. Without failing or most popular galleries, or the admirable
role of the Modern Museum of Art, one has to acknowledge that they in no way can
compete with a medium such as television for range - it is our so far most
effective means of distributing images. Most people will agree that television
is extremely effective, but in art circles television is seen as nothing more
than a publicity-machine. Television can produce programs on an exhibition,
explaining and attracting visitors to the source itself, which consists of the
de facto exhibited objects. Few people are ready to agree that television itself
is a medium and a gallery for the visual artist. They are again haunted by the
myth of the original, the "thing" which is "art itself." It is a concession to
this same myth, when the artists of Multiart are asked to sign an edition of
1/300 copies. It would have been more logical to print, that is, machine sign a
mass-produced piece of art. If you work directly for the TV screen, with
electronics as your brush, no one would probably think of having artists
travelling around, signing all the millions of television
monitors."

In 1968, Ture Sjolander,
along with 600 million other viewers, studied the satellite transmissions from
NASA's spaceflights around the moon. This study resulted in a new production for
the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, called 'Space in the Brain.' People now
had colour TV, and it seemed natural for an artist to comment on those historic
events with a new piece of work.

A new agreement was made
with the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, this time with Sjolander, Bror
Wikström, Lars Svanberg and Sven Höglund. The photographer Lennart Nilsson delivered a recently taken picture of the
human eye as seen from the inside, and NASA's photo department contributed with
the best film footage from all their previous spaceflights. The final commentary
of their "space-opera" was an electronic explosion of colour. The theme of the
production was two poles: one, which we call space (and that we do not know so
much about yet), and the other, that which a person registers through the eye
(and which we do not know too much about either). This, and man's vanity, was
that 'space' which the artists referred to. Tapestries for interior design and
world-wide best-selling posters were produced out of this static visual
material. Hansson/Karlsson made the music for the TV-"program." An LP-record was
also released.

In 1970, Sjolander's next
project was a analytical photo-essay, a book on the mysterious Greta Garbo (published by Harper&Collins, New York 1971). This time he was
working with ordinary documentary pictures, nothing was electronically
manipulated. The book was a success, both commercially and as a documentary.

The Garbo biography was
published in several countries, such as the United States, Canada, the UK,
Sweden and Germany.

Chaplin's "My life in
pictures," was Ture Sjolander's idea, and as a compensation for him letting them
take over the book project and the dummy of the book, Chaplin's family ordered
an edition of a graphic art portfolio containing 30 different screen-prints, 60
x 60 cm. The portfolios were signed were signed and numbered by Sjolander and
autographed by Charlie Chaplin. Sjolander has
interviewed both Chaplin and Garbo and he calls those two great contemporary
stars "images." It is as such, that they have been met by their audience of
millions of people.

Rune
Jonsson

August 1977

Translated from Swedish by Linda
Henriksson.

From the Swedish Culture Magazine

KANNIBAL

No
3:1985

"In 1961, Swedish television
only broadcasted on one channel, in black and white of course. The most
upsetting thing that had been shown so far, was Per
Oscarsson taking off his longjohns in the family entertainment program
Hylands Hörna, and this caused a public outcry. It was in those quiet
backwaters, at a time when Jan Myrdal had not yet
been hit on the head with the Vietnam billy stick, that the artists Ture
Sjolander and Bror Wikström started experimenting with the TV medium as an
art-form. Why produce 100 litographies, when you can distribute your work of art
to 8, 50, 100 people via television and satellites?, they wondered. But most
important was the protest against the traditional use of the television
technology itself, and turning a media-development into a free and artistic
intervention became necessary.

However, it was difficult to
find the necessary support to realise their ideas. The framework was very
narrow, but Ture Sjolander already knew this. The year before, in 1965, he had
made a first attempt to produce television art, directly for the medium, and he
was stopped. The program, "Have you thought about the role of photography…?",
was already in the TV-guides, but it was completely censored by the direction of
the Broadcasting Corporation. "They have never given me any valid justification
for their censorship," Ture Sjolander says today.

Perhaps it was censored
because he had photographed nude models from grotesque angles and wildly
grimacing people? Along with Oscarsson's longjohns, this provides us with a
clear image of how far you could go in the Swedish society of 1968.

"Ture lives in a pink wooden
house on Gärdet in Stockholm. It is surrounded by fences, mysterious sculptures
and menacing beware-of-the-dog signs. Is he a bitter recluse, who is hiding away
in his nest, while dreaming about the happy '60s? Not at all. Ture looks fresh
and wears well-ironed clothes, looking a lot younger than 47.

First, some personal
details:

Recipient of a Royal Artist
Grant. He is not listed in the telephone directory, and it is extremely
difficult to get through to his answering machine. He was the first person in
Sweden, and probably internationally, who realised the possibilities of video
and television for art, culture and advanced communication. As early as 1966, he
wanted to distribute his "video art" (even though the word was not yet invented)
via satellite.

He is a multi-media artist
who has collaborated with, among others, the rock band Hansson&Karlsson.
Hologram expert. Author on books about Greta Garbo and Charles Chaplin. Founder
of the association Video-NU-Videocentrum (with 150 members and fifteen corporate
members).

Except for being a
visionary, Sjolander has a bunch of other projects coming up. He is trying to
get government funding so he can document the public art in Sweden (or will
McDonald's be the sponsor?). He wants to make a movie out of Erik Lundqvist's book "No tobacco, no Hallelujah" (he has
already bought the film rights from the author, and a contract has been signed
with the production company Måsen and the author) and Ann
Zacharias. He is planning a trip to Papua New Guinea.

Sjolander started thinking
about the possibilities of the TV medium and its power to connect with its
audience. He found a partner in Bror Wikström, who was a major talent at the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts. However, he had turned his back on those very people
calling him a talent. Sjolander and Wikström became inseparable and they
followed in no one's footsteps, they went beyond pop art, which was the most
extreme art form at the time.

We wanted to punch pop art
in the face, meaning that we wanted to use those big outdoor billboards and wall
spaces in subway stations for example, that inspired the pop artists, and we
were inspired to use this space as an art space, not for commercial purposes.

Bror and I were "best
friends and enemies" at the same time, we were working on a completely
unexplored theme, we worked day and night for one and a half years with a new
manifest, on television, on photo exhibitions and galleries. I remember Bror
advertising among the ads for galleries in Dagens Nyheter: "Gallery of Thought -
outdoor exhibition" in Kungsträdgården (the King's Gardens) in Stockholm
city. But it was not a "gallery" as such. Kungsträdgården is always a gallery of
thought, the image that remains on your retina. Bror has left the art world now,
he cannot go back to painting, he cannot turn back the time. The
"bijouterie-painters" hated him because he was so far ahead of them, both
artistically and academically. My activities in those years were a protest
against the word. The art critics were writing away, expressing guesses and
opinions. "You go ahead and write," I thought. "Ten years ago I presented a
complete presentation about a video studio for research, education and
production (it has been postponed for years by the Art Council of Sweden, that
is complaining about how badly prepared we are for satellite programs today!).

"I called on all the
political parties in 1974 together with Bror Wikström.

Demand:

increase in the budget of
the Government Art Council for Public Art, for the purpose of artistically
humanising public places. At the communist party leader's, the clothing was a
working class jacket, at the right wing party leader Boman's, the clothing was
Sunday-best shirt and a grey suit.

Result:

the budget increased from
SEK 3,7 million to 11 million! (Ture does not mind the epithet Cameleon
Master).

"I know what is normal and
acceptable in society, and at the same time I am bored with it. Sometimes I
psyche myself up by behaving recklessly … to feel free." There you go. To the
above catalogue, we may add that Ture Sjolander, if anyone, can be named the
father of Swedish video art. The curators of the International Video Festival in Stockholm, held from
February through March, managed to convince Sjolander to come there and talk
about how it all began in Sweden. Ture showed up, immaculately dressed in a
white suit and pink tie. Ture began by saying: "We wanted the artist to really
exhibit, not to inhibit at museums and galleries." On the last night of the
festival, Ture Sjolander showed the TV program that had been stopped in 1965, on
a 6x7 m big screen, just after the show about American punk and underground
videos. "- Visual art of today is at the same stage that literature was before
Gutenberg's invention of the printing press." This is a typical quote from
Sjolander in 1963. He explains: "Let's take an artist such as Ulf Rahmberg, who
paints symbolic paintings with a very political content. He works six months on
a painting, using the most expensive canvas and oil paint. Then he sells it to
some damn wealthy dentist who shuts it up in his private living room. When he
has such an important symbolic message, he should paint on toilet paper with
poster paint and distribute it on postcards, posters, video and television!
Preferably via satellite!

The distribution is just as
important as art itself: to communicate about communication is just as important
as the mode of communication. The Mona Lisa-painting is not interesting per se,
it is the interplay between the people looking at the painting that has become
interesting. Because almost no one is interested in the painting, its power of
attraction is over after three minutes."

Öyvind
Fahlström once put it this way: "Hang up a Rembrandt on your wall, it will blend in with the pattern
of the linoleum within a weeks time. It is just a myth, an illusion, that it its
value is alive and continuous and that you can look at it anew one day after the
next … People who can experience that must be completely
crazy."

Öyvind Fahlström died
in 1976 and when we meet Sjolander, parts of Fahlström's production is hanging
on the walls of one of Stockholm's more pretentious galleries. We looked at the
exhibition and felt slightly vertiginous, or perhaps nauseous? Fahlström's
protests against the US warfare in Vietnam were sold for approximately SEK
500,000 a piece, and then we are talking about graphic prints. "It is
interesting, but really not that strange," Ture says. "First of all: I do not
believe that Fahlström tried to express a protest, he connected a modern series
of events… "(the magazine is ruined and the text illegible).

"Sjolander speaks fast, is
well articulated and convincing. He runs around in his house, finding newspaper
clippings with quotes to support his ideas. I am sure he can be a difficult
bastard.

- Once I was invited to talk
about public art with some old local government councillors. I suggested that
I'd make something with big fingerprints in concrete, where the grooves of the
fingerprint would be about 1/2 metre tall. 'Well, isn't that a funny idea,' said
one of the old councillors, 'one would have to hope that it were to be the city
mayor's fingerprints then.' I felt completely fed up and paralysed by the whole
thing, by the disrespect of an original idea. I couldn't see any development. I
couldn't do what Michelangelo did, which was shoving the axe into the ground in
front of the councillor and say: 'It was my concept, therefore it will be my
fingerprints.'

In the socialistic
countries, art is also governed by the politicians' wishes. There is a pressure
from above: 'You bloody artist, we want you to paint a worker who is using a
sledge hammer.' So the artists adapt, and become clever "photographic" painters.
'Just look at the art clubs in Sweden. They have tremendous power. There are 400
clubs, and it is said that they have about 400,000 members altogether, at Atlas
Copco, ICA, Honeywell Bull, whatever. It's a fun thing for those who sit in
front of their computer screens all day long, they get a bit of status if they
can do some art-thing in their spare time. For them to buy something for their
art raffles, it had better be something ingratiating. Artists are aware of this
now, so they paint something that will please the majority - instead of going
broke.

Christian Wigardt /
Erik Ohlsson1985

Translated from Swedish by Linda
Henriksson.

1966

see
below:

DAGENS
NYHETER

The largest daily
news paper in Sweden

Bonnier
AB

This following
article about: "TIME" by Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom, was published in
Dagens Nyheter

August 29,
1966.

Signed:
DIA

(Dick
Idestam-Almqvist)

-----------------------------------------------

TV
"exposes" the present in electronic pictures during the Jazz
Festival.

"We want to
exhibit, not to inhibit"

So the artists
Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom say, of current interest as they are for the
coming jazz festival within the Festival of Stockholm. Some time during
the three days of the jazz festival (Sept 16 - 18) the two picture
experimenter's new film is shown on TV. It is ready made for TV with the
apparatus of the TV and with the basic function of the TV before one's
sight.

Some year ago
Sjolander and Wikstrom brought about a sensation by exposing pictures on giant
billboards outdoor's in Stockholm's City. If you had something to display you
shouldn't fence it, neither in the museums nor among the private art galleries,
but expose it where people are to be found, they thought. So consequently they
have chosen the biggest medium of communication, television, for their latest
exhibition.

Sjolander -
Wikstrom are fully conscious of the topicalness of today, another reason for
choosing television. What else can be more actual than to demonstrate the formal
possibilities of TV, and what else can be more actual than mirror the present
while you are demonstrating these formal possibilities?

"Scanner"
re-interprets.

"Time" is the name
of the exhibition, which is based upon various actualities that
Sjolander-Wikstrom have come across during the spring, for instance "Gemini" and
foetal-pictures. The main part is taken up by the very much to fore avant-garde
jazz-musician Don Cherry and his quintet at the Golden
Circle.

The pictures are
run through a specially built "scanner", an apparatus that in the ordinary cases
is producing "real" pictures, but which in this sensitized state is
"re-interpreting" what the camera has seen, and thus is creating new pictures.
The technicians and the artists have decided what the apparatus looks like, and
the apparatus has decided what the pictures look like.

The present is
reflected.

Consequently the
couple Sjolander-Wikstrom is demonstrating a phenomenon that is very much up to
date just now: the electronic "machine" picture.

The Korean Nam
June Paik is for the moment sitting at the Swedish Radio and is working with
similar things. He will show his result at the festival of Fylkingen "Visions
of thePresent". But this will take place one week after
Sjolander-Wikstrom's demonstration, televised on Swedish National
Television.

Ture Sjolander and
Bror Wikstrom hold that they by "TIME" have accomplished a total
reflection of the present. Novelties and actualities have been interpreted by an
apparatus that per se is a novelty and an actuality. A vision of the
present.

Their Ideas they
spread in different quises like rings on the water. "Time" will be shown at ABF
(The Worker's Federation of Culture) during the festival, still
pictures of the film - made on silk-screen - will be exposed, and an
edition of 300 prints have already been sold to MULTIART, the darling of
Kristian Romare.

Finally a summary
of the film will be edited in book-form very soon. And then, furthermore,
Sjolander-Wikstrom are negotiating just now about contributing at the festival
which the Americans of "Fylkingen" are planning in New York
in October.

The First film of an "Electron in Motion" was
authentically documented/registred on film 1966. The experiments was broadcasted
to a Television audience of 150 million, all over Europe 1968. Controlling the
electronic signal, guided a new movements of further developments of animation
and morphing as well as video art. www.firstfilmedelectron.homestead.com/

Just before Nam June Paik made his first
FREE artistic video tapes the Swedish/Australian artist Ture Sjolander made
"TIME" 1966, "MONUMENT" 1967 and later 1969 " Space in the Brain" the latter
production in co-operation with NASA space center, the Apollo 11 Flight, and in
conjunction with the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation. www.MONUMENT1967.homestead.com/

The First film of an "Electron in
Motion" was authentically documented/registred on film 1966. The experiments was
broadcasted to a Televisi...The First film of an "Electron in Motion" was
authentically documented/registred on film 1966. The experiments was broadcasted
to a Television audience of 150 million, all over Europe 1968. Controlling the
electronic signal, guided a new movements of further developments of animation
and morphing as well as video art. www.firstfilmedelectron.homestead.com/ Just
before Nam June Paik made his first FREE artistic video tapes the
Swedish/Australian artist Ture Sjolander made "TIME" 1966, "MONUMENT" 1967 and later 1969
" Space in the Brain"
the latter production in co-operation with NASA space center, the Apollo 11
Flight, and in conjunction with the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation. www.MONUMENT1967.homestead.com/